The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Exemplary touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to manipulate user interface objects on a display.
Exemplary manipulations include adjusting the position and/or size of one or more user interface objects, as well as associating metadata with one or more user interface objects. Exemplary user interface objects include digital images, representations of calendar events, video, text, icons, and other graphics. A user may need to perform such manipulations on user interface objects in a calendar application (e.g., iCal from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a file management program (e.g., Finder from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), an image management application (e.g., Aperture or iPhoto from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a digital content (e.g., videos and music) management application (e.g., iTunes from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a drawing application, a presentation application (e.g., Keynote from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a word processing application (e.g., Pages from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a website creation application (e.g., iWeb from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a disk authoring application (e.g., iDVD from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), or a spreadsheet application (e.g., Numbers from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.).
But existing methods for performing these manipulations are cumbersome and inefficient. For example, using a sequence of mouse-based inputs to select one or more user interface objects and perform one or more actions on the selected user interface objects is tedious and creates a significant cognitive burden on a user. In addition, existing methods take longer than necessary, thereby wasting energy. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.